Corpus analysis reveals increasing references to gender alongside persistent marginalization in UN General Assembly speeches, indicating a dilution of gender equality priorities.
Key Points
Investigate how gender equality is constructed, prioritized, and integrated across United Nations General Assembly speeches over a 31-year period.
Conducted a large-scale computational discourse and text analysis on a corpus of 171,901 speeches (92.72 million words) spanning from 1993 to 2023.
Identified 20 recurring thematic clusters and analyzed patterns across time and speaker gender.
Geopolitical concerns consistently dominated discourse, leaving gender equality and women's empowerment as secondary, embedded themes rather than standalone priorities.
Women's participation in speeches increased from 4.8% in 1993 to 35.5% in 2023, though this demographic increase did not uniformly lead to greater discursive centrality for gender issues.